When not standing around a Disney-run lobby in a silly red uniform, tapping a tiny xylophone to signal end of intermission, Usher’s home on his computer, sweating over his “big, black and queer-ass American Broadway show.” Interrupting the writer’s focus are six bitchy Thoughts that pelt him with self-doubt, financial worry, sexual confusion and other cheery topics. Usher gets his name from the fact that he is an usher at The Lion King. It’s a musical fever dream, more an expressionist song cycle than a traditional book show. That might sound like a spoiler, but A Strange Loop (gracefully staged by Stephen Brackett) is driven by anything but plot. With the achingly wistful final notes of A Strange Loop, our much-harassed hero, Usher (Jaquel Spivey) comes to the liberating thought that identity and change may only be an illusion.
By the end of MJ, we don’t know if Michael’s gay, asexual, or criminally messed up, but his music transports us across generations. Both stories poke and prod at Black male sexuality they trace the lifelong scars that domineering parents leave they dramatize the misfit in a label-crazy world and they allow their heroes and audience to escape ugliness through art, which doesn’t make the pain go away, but clears space for ambiguity.
